AliEn Resource Brokers

AliEn (ALICE Environment) is a lightweight GRID framework developed by the Alice Collaboration. When the experiment starts running, it will collect data at a rate of approximately 2 PB per year, producing O(109) files per year. All these files, including all simulated events generated during the preparation phase of the experiment, must be accounted and reliably tracked in the GRID environment. The backbone of AliEn is a distributed file catalogue, which associates universal logical file name to physical file names for each dataset and provides transparent access to datasets independently of physical location. The file replication and transport is carried out under the control of the File Transport Broker. In addition, the file catalogue maintains information about every job running in the system. The jobs are distributed by the Job Resource Broker that is implemented using a simplified pull (as opposed to traditional push) architecture. This paper describes the Job and File Transport Resource Brokers and shows that a similar architecture can be applied to solve both problems.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, CHEP 03 conferenc

The Need for a Versioned Data Analysis Software Environment

Scientific results in high-energy physics and in many other fields often rely on complex software stacks. In order to support reproducibility and scrutiny of the results, it is good practice to use open source software and to cite software packages and versions. With ever-growing complexity of scientific software on one side and with IT life-cycles of only a few years on the other side, however, it turns out that despite source code availability the setup and the validation of a minimal usable analysis environment can easily become prohibitively expensive. We argue that there is a substantial gap between merely having access to versioned source code and the ability to create a data analysis runtime environment. In order to preserve all the different variants of the data analysis runtime environment, we developed a snapshotting file system optimized for software distribution. We report on our experience in preserving the analysis environment for high-energy physics such as the software landscape used to discover the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider

PROOF as a Service on the Cloud: a Virtual Analysis Facility based on the CernVM ecosystem

PROOF, the Parallel ROOT Facility, is a ROOT-based framework which enables interactive parallelism for event-based tasks on a cluster of computing nodes. Although PROOF can be used simply from within a ROOT session with no additional requirements, deploying and configuring a PROOF cluster used to be not as straightforward. Recently great efforts have been spent to make the provisioning of generic PROOF analysis facilities with zero configuration, with the added advantages of positively affecting both stability and scalability, making the deployment operations feasible even for the end user. Since a growing amount of large-scale computing resources are nowadays made available by Cloud providers in a virtualized form, we have developed the Virtual PROOF-based Analysis Facility: a cluster appliance combining the solid CernVM ecosystem and PoD (PROOF on Demand), ready to be deployed on the Cloud and leveraging some peculiar Cloud features such as elasticity. We will show how this approach is effective both for sysadmins, who will have little or no configuration to do to run it on their Clouds, and for the end users, who are ultimately in full control of their PROOF cluster and can even easily restart it by themselves in the unfortunate event of a major failure. We will also show how elasticity leads to a more optimal and uniform usage of Cloud resources.Comment: Talk from Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics 2013 (CHEP2013), Amsterdam (NL), October 2013, 7 pages, 4 figure

The MammoGrid Project Grids Architecture

The aim of the recently EU-funded MammoGrid project is, in the light of emerging Grid technology, to develop a European-wide database of mammograms that will be used to develop a set of important healthcare applications and investigate the potential of this Grid to support effective co-working between healthcare professionals throughout the EU. The MammoGrid consortium intends to use a Grid model to enable distributed computing that spans national borders. This Grid infrastructure will be used for deploying novel algorithms as software directly developed or enhanced within the project. Using the MammoGrid clinicians will be able to harness the use of massive amounts of medical image data to perform epidemiological studies, advanced image processing, radiographic education and ultimately, tele-diagnosis over communities of medical "virtual organisations". This is achieved through the use of Grid-compliant services [1] for managing (versions of) massively distributed files of mammograms, for handling the distributed execution of mammograms analysis software, for the development of Grid-aware algorithms and for the sharing of resources between multiple collaborating medical centres. All this is delivered via a novel software and hardware information infrastructure that, in addition guarantees the integrity and security of the medical data. The MammoGrid implementation is based on AliEn, a Grid framework developed by the ALICE Collaboration. AliEn provides a virtual file catalogue that allows transparent access to distributed data-sets and provides top to bottom implementation of a lightweight Grid applicable to cases when handling of a large number of files is required. This paper details the architecture that will be implemented by the MammoGrid project.Comment: Talk PSN MOAT0005 from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, 4 figure

Evidence for an exotic S=-2, Q=-2 baryon resonance in proton-proton collisions at the CERN SPS

Results of resonance searches in the Xi - pi -, Xi - pi +, Xi -bar+ pi -, and Xi -bar+ pi + invariant mass spectra in proton-proton collisions at sqrt[s]=17.2 GeV are presented. Evidence is shown for the existence of a narrow Xi - pi - baryon resonance with mass of 1.862±0.002 GeV/c2 and width below the detector resolution of about 0.018 GeV/c2. The significance is estimated to be above 4.2 sigma . This state is a candidate for the hypothetical exotic Xi --3/2 baryon with S=-2, I=3 / 2, and a quark content of (dsdsu-bar). At the same mass, a peak is observed in the Xi - pi + spectrum which is a candidate for the Xi 03/2 member of this isospin quartet with a quark content of (dsusd-bar). The corresponding antibaryon spectra also show enhancements at the same invariant mass

System size and centrality dependence of the balance function in A+A collisions at sqrt[sNN]=17.2 GeV

Electric charge correlations were studied for p+p, C+C, Si+Si, and centrality selected Pb+Pb collisions at sqrt[sNN]=17.2 GeV with the NA49 large acceptance detector at the CERN SPS. In particular, long-range pseudorapidity correlations of oppositely charged particles were measured using the balance function method. The width of the balance function decreases with increasing system size and centrality of the reactions. This decrease could be related to an increasing delay of hadronization in central Pb+Pb collisions

A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s

Particle physics has an ambitious and broad experimental programme for the coming decades. This programme requires large investments in detector hardware, either to build new facilities and experiments, or to upgrade existing ones. Similarly, it requires commensurate investment in the R&D of software to acquire, manage, process, and analyse the shear amounts of data to be recorded. In planning for the HL-LHC in particular, it is critical that all of the collaborating stakeholders agree on the software goals and priorities, and that the efforts complement each other. In this spirit, this white paper describes the R&D activities required to prepare for this software upgrade.Peer reviewe

Azimuthal anisotropy of charged jet production in root s(NN)=2.76 TeV Pb-Pb collisions

We present measurements of the azimuthal dependence of charged jet production in central and semi-central root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV Pb-Pb collisions with respect to the second harmonic event plane, quantified as nu(ch)(2) (jet). Jet finding is performed employing the anti-k(T) algorithm with a resolution parameter R = 0.2 using charged tracks from the ALICE tracking system. The contribution of the azimuthal anisotropy of the underlying event is taken into account event-by-event. The remaining (statistical) region-to-region fluctuations are removed on an ensemble basis by unfolding the jet spectra for different event plane orientations independently. Significant non-zero nu(ch)(2) (jet) is observed in semi-central collisions (30-50% centrality) for 20 <p(T)(ch) (jet) <90 GeV/c. The azimuthal dependence of the charged jet production is similar to the dependence observed for jets comprising both charged and neutral fragments, and compatible with measurements of the nu(2) of single charged particles at high p(T). Good agreement between the data and predictions from JEWEL, an event generator simulating parton shower evolution in the presence of a dense QCD medium, is found in semi-central collisions. (C) 2015 CERN for the benefit of the ALICE Collaboration. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Peer reviewe